Sunday, September 09, 2012

Remember that phrase -- "grim milestone" -- whenever a round number of U.S. troops had perished in Afghanistan or Iraq? Gallons of ink were consumed to market the phrase during the years George W. Bush served as president.

In August, the U.S. surpassed the 2,000 KIA mark in Afghanistan to almost no fanfare. As Dan Riehl observes, much of the U.S. is numb to the heroic sacrifices of our military, primarily because vintage media no longer has a Republican president to hammer.

There was no story last week on the Afghanistan death “milestone” on ABC, NBC, the PBS NewsHour – or even on the MSNBC programs found in Nexis, including Rachel “Our Military’s In a Perilous Drift” Maddow.

But the networks were all more aggressive when the 2,000 mark arrived in Iraq on October 25, 2005. The Big Three networks devoted 14 morning and evening news stories to the death toll from October 24 through the end of October, and another 24 anchor briefs or mentions. They used the number to spell “disaster for this White House.”

I did a quick Google News Search (for the phrase "grim milestone" AND ("afghanistan" OR "iraq")) by year to determine whether the phrase had gone out of favor about the time President Obama took office.

"But we must never forget. This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." - President Training Wheels, 2009

Exactly what are we doing there right now, and why is it necessary? We were killing, capturing and interrogating al-Qaeda in Iraq. We were doing something else there too ... oh, yeah! We were winning the damn war!